Stephen Green, the VodkaPundit, lays out rather neatly the reasons that I was opposed to the Gulf War. Check his post out—it’s well worth reading. The one thing he misses is that ending the Gulf War as we did is the price we paid for waging the war as we did.
Steve writes:
With the benefit of hindsight, however, it’s fair to question both our goals and our methods. In fact, the First Gulf War disillusioned most of the liberal reformers in the Middle East, set bad precedents for future conflicts, gave cause to an international terrorist, and empowered a new generation of starry-eyed peaceniks.
Except that in my case I predicted every bit of what happened and, consequently, it wasn’t hindsight it was foresight.
Did your vast powers of foresight reveal the crystal clear, perfect policy that would have made everything turn out all right? Because that’s the kind of information that we really need. It’s not that difficult to offer predictions of doom and failure.
One of the underlying assumptions in these kinds of discussions around the blogosphere seems to be that in foreign policy we have before us a variety of good and bad options, but that somehow we keep choosing the bad options and if we would instead choose the good options then we wouldn’t be in the situation we are in. But it seems to me that in reality we have almost exclusively a variety of bad options to choose from. So we are always in a situation of trying to generate some good out of a bad situation.
Also, underlying people’s opinions about what actions we should or should not take are people’s views about whether or not the US should be a superpower. It seems to me that people who consistently oppose US military presence and action overseas (excluding the anti-American Left who belong in a different category) are people who don’t want the US to be a superpower. They want us to be just another ordinary country like Brazil or Sweden or New Zealand. And they dismiss out of hand any argument that the US might actually be doing some good as a superpower and that as bad as the world is now it would be even worse without America as the world’s policeman. While I sympathize with that perspective, and indeed there are times when I lay back with my eyes closed and fantasize about just such thing, nevertheless the time comes when I must wake myself from that fantasy and realize that the world we inhabit will not let us go our peaceful way. Dictators, terrorists, religious and political fanatics, et al have their own agendas, they are not just reacting to American policies and if we chose to not take the kinds of actions we have taken then there would still be no peace and they would not leave us alone. They would continue to pursue their agendas which are inherently hostile to the kind of free society that we have been striving to establish. This free society is a rare and precious thing. The freedom and affluence we have achieved here are the exception not the rule in the history of human societies. It is that rule that we will continue to struggle afgainst for a long time to come.
Apparently, I’m one of the few who thinks the Bush 41 gang did a pretty nice job of handling and isolating Saddam without opening up the sectarian can-o’-worms that is Iraq. Initially, I was upset that we decided not to finish the job. But after listening to Secretary of State Baker and Colin Powell explain the complications if we did, I got it.
The “people want freedom” meme appeals to the depths of my humanistic soul. But I’m wary to assume that it immediately translates to hardcore religiously submissive tribes. And that skepticism extends to phrases such as ‘liberal reformers in the ME’. Over time, liberty must prevail but it’s a slow and daunting process.
Sure: build domestic political support before going to war. A simple majority is not sufficient. You need a real, vocal consensus. That wasn’t there in Gulf War I and it wasn’t there in 2003 when we invaded Iraq for the second time.
Domestic political support allows lowered expectations to be acceptable and means that an increased level of casualties won’t cause a political crisis.
And if you simply can’t muster the domestic political support don’t go to war. Sometimes it’s better to deal with consequences rather than trying to shape outcomes.
I agree with your point about good options. One thing that a lot folks don’t understand is that when you’ve made enough poor decisions, there aren’t any good choices left. In the Middle East an enormous number of the bad decisions were made 50, 60, 80, 100, or 1,000 years ago. Mostly not by us. It baffles me that we feel the need to support British and French political decisions made 100 years ago that even the British and the French don’t believe in anymore.
Well, I fit into that category and I’m emphatically not a member of the anti-American Left nor do I yearn for America to be just another country. I think it’s inevitable and inescapable that we’ll be a superpower. Not true FWIW for Russia or China—it’s inevitable that they’ll be regional powers but they’re not inevitably superpowers. Their geography is against it, for one thing. The Soviet Union was only a world superpower by virtue of nuclear weapons.
I believe that we should be very, very reluctant to use military force in influencing events but, when we do, we should be victorious. If we’re not willing to be victorious, we should find another way. Victory has its costs but its infinitely better than the alternative.
BTW, phil, you don’t need to snark at me. I’m actually a pretty temperate and decent interlocutor. In the case of Steve’s remark I was stating a simple fact: it wasn’t only in hindsight that the outcome of Gulf War I could be seen.
kreiz, I don’t have a Wilsonian bone in my body. I think it would be darned nice if everybody lived in and wanted to live in liberal democracies but that it’s going to be rough sledding to base a foreign policy around that idea especially without a national consensus.
I think of myself as a neo-Jeffersonian and John Quincy Adams’s comments (despite my castigation of other comments of his a couple of weeks ago) in that regard appeal to me:
In search of Wilsonian bones. I’m there too, dude. There’s something refreshing and real about JQA’s curmudgeon nature.
Thanks to your insight above (and JQA’s), it just dawned on me why I cringed when I first heard the pre-War GWB phrase “Iraqi democracy”. Shades of Wilson.
“I believe that we should be very, very reluctant to use military force in influencing events but, when we do, we should be victorious. If we’re not willing to be victorious, we should find another way. Victory has its costs but its infinitely better than the alternative.”
I completely agree. I am a reluctant Wilsonian. I would like nothing more than for the rest of the world to adequately manage their own affairs so that we could enjoy the blessings of liberty. But too many people around the world have an inclination towards the illiberal and when they create political and religious movements the US always seems to be at the top of their list of what they oppose. So it seems to me that we have no choice but to try to nudge the world in a direction that is ultimately best for us. The alternative is to see others nudging it in directions that are very dangerous for us.
“BTW, phil, you don’t need to snark at me. I’m actually a pretty temperate and decent interlocutor.”
Yeah I know. I didn’t mean anything by it. Nothing but a little friendly sarcasm. I just thought it was amusing that you were unabashedly bragging about your foresight.
Puncturing I can take.
It was said more in sorrow than in bragging.